Prowl of the Marauders, Chapter 3
It was on the Easter of the year that Harry was to go to Hogwarts that Peter Pettigrew discovered that his young ward could speak to snakes. His "family" had gone to church (without taking "the freak", not that Peter would have let them, knowing from his own experiences that, while muggle churches themselves were usually fine, just places where the ambient power of the universe was so strong that the muggles could feel it, sometimes priests and pastors would try to exorcise the demons from Wizarding children, which, if the wizard was powerful enough and the event was traumatic, an obscurus could form. Peter himself had only escaped that fate because he was a weak wizard, and even so, for long periods of time after the event, he had been too scared even to say the word "magic".
But in any case, since Harry had not wanted or been allowed to go with his "dearest" relations, Peter had taken Harry down to the little park near No. 4 Privet Dr. on Magnolia Crescent to play, since he didn't want to risk exhausting his juvenile magical core by learning and practicing too much wandless magic and they were both tired of rereading Peter's few books and the Dursleys' stacks of nonfiction and old newspapers (the only fiction in the whole house besides Cliff Notes for whatever Dudley was supposed to have read for his classes were Aunt Petunia's furtively-read bodice rippers, which Peter refused to let Harry read).
Harry did not have many toys (though Peter had certainly bought as many as he could with the sporadic bursts of muggle money he could get by doing muggle odd jobs like he had in the old days; while the Wizengamot has railroaded Sirius into Azkaban, the goblins had never quite accepted the supposed evidence of Black's betrayal, and so had blocked Peter's accounts. Not that he didn't deserve it, but it made it rather harder than it would have been to get the galleons necessary for keeping up his disguise in the Wizarding World and buying things for Harry) and so the boy played make-believe games with sticks and rocks and little grass flowers, as well as the wood chips in the playground. Soon, he had disappeared from sight, but Peter wasn't worried: he had cast a monitoring charm on the boy, and would thus know if he was too far away or had gotten into any sort of trouble.
Not ten minutes later, however, Harry came running back to him. "Uncle Peter, Uncle Peter, look!"
Peter obliged him. When he saw what Harry was trying to show him though, his mouth went dry. "Um. Harry? Y-you might want to put that down. Slowly."
"It's ok, Uncle Peter, she said she wouldn't hurt me. Or you," he added, as the triangle-headed snake hissed.
"Sh-she said?" Peter repeated dumbly, a drop of cold sweat trickling slowly down his neck. "What do you mean 'she said'?" He hoped to Merlin that Harry hadn't said what he thought he'd said. Please let it just be some sort of misunderstanding!
"Oh, yes! She's quite nice, actually! Her name is Hssshashassss." Without more adieu, he began to hiss happily to the horrid creature, sounding rather like a juvenile- and sane- version of the Dark Lord. Even more so when the snake hissed back.
Peter tensed up, ready to run, ready to grab the little beast and drag it off his charge if necessary, but somehow not able to move.
"Are you ok? Hssshashassss promised not to bite you..."
"I..." Peter was finding it very difficult to speak, especially as his muscles were tensed to the point of pain and his heart was beating so very fast that his chest thronged. "I've been better."
Harry hissed something very quickly to the snake, put it down, and turned back to Peter. "You don't like snakes?" He asked, innocently. "Or did I do something wrong? I thought that everyone could talk to snakes!"
Peter did his best to wrangle his features into something vaguely normal. "Harry, my animagus form is a rat," he said, trying to put off telling him the inevitable. "That thing could eat me in one bite." He paused. He would have to tell Harry at some point, but this was a little young. All the same, it would probably be best if his young ward knew to keep his parseltongue hidden when he went to Hogwarts; it would not be good if someone, say Dumbledore (or, Merlin forbid, Snivellus) found out that he was a snake speaker, and the public would probably crucify him. "And no. Not everyone can talk to snakes. The skill is called parseltongue, and someone who can speak it is called a parselmouth. It can be learned, but it is usually inherited, through two main lines: Slytherin, and (much more rarely) Patil. It can also be found in some Greek and Indian families." He paused, wishing there was some way he could think of to soften the blow. "As far as I know, the only other natural parselmouth in Britain is the Dark Lord himself."
Harry paled. "So You-Know-Who can talk to snakes too?"
"Yes. Being a parselmouth does not make you evil, but some people think that it does, and so it is probably a good idea not to speak parseltongue around other wizards who do not already know, unless you completely trust them."
"But how can I tell if I'm talking parseltongue? It just sounds like English to me..."
Peter shivered. "I can't help you there. It sounds like hissing to me, just the hissing of a snake."
"You don't like it." Harry didn't have to be a psychoanalyst to have figured that one out.
Peter nodded uneasily.
"Do you not like me, too?"
Peter was horrified at that, however. "Harry, I don't care if you were the Dark Lord's long lost love child, I would still like you, child. It's just...parseltongue does not recall happy memories for me; I was having a flashback." That last had not been strictly true, but Peter was hardly going to tell his ward, who had fragile enough self-esteem as it was, that he had been, even for the briefest of moments, terrified of him.
"Ok then. So if it's just you...would you be ok with me talking to Hssshashassss? She said that she would enjoy being my friend..."
Peter hesitated. This was probably not at all a good idea, but Harry looked so happy... "If she will consent to me putting a ward on her so that she cannot bite humans unless they've hurt her first, I won't mind," he said, not in the least trusting the word of a snake when it was his Harry's life on the line.
Harry held a hissing conference with the snake, and then broke into a broad grin. "She says yes!" Then Harry (to Peter's secret alarm) hugged both him and the snake. Peter hesitantly cast the ward, making the snake a bit of a safer pet, and then Harry let her slither up his arm until she was dangerously close to his neck. It was all Peter could do not to drag her off by the tail; a venomous snake so close to Harry's face! But Harry was smiling and chattering away to the snake, and Peter could not deny the boy a pet, as long as it couldn't hurt him, and the ward had insured that the snake could not. He just hoped this was not a terrible mistake. And how, in Merlin's name, could the Boy-Who-Lived, child of a Light scion and a muggleborn and the sweetest little thing in the world (ok, he was biased, but seriously!) be a parselmouth? Peter could not think of any legitimate way that the boy could have inherited it, which scared him even more; his rat senses didn't like it, and they were rarely ever wrong.
Peter stared off into the distance, lost in thought, only vaguely keeping an eye on Harry to make sure that that horrible little creature behaved. The only ways he could think of for Harry to be a parselmouth were that Lily was not actually a muggleborn or that there was some discrepancy in the Potter family tree. Or...here a shiver ran down his spine, as a dementor had ran its fleshless finger down it-what if Harry was not a Potter at all? Or what if it was some souvenir, for lack of a better word, from the Dark Lord's defeat? Those last two scared him spitless, and he realized- for the first time- that he had never actually taken Harry to get looked at at St. Mungo's. Another thing that he would have to take care of before Harry went to Hogwarts for his first year...
Right. He had a very long list of things that they would have to do once Harry got his Hogwarts letter and was to reenter Wizarding society. Take Harry to St. Mungo's for shots and a checkup (something that he couldn't do before because he was not the boy's legal guardian, although he definitely hoped to change that if Harry was ok with that). Check in at Gringotts and make sure Harry's accounts and properties (and perhaps his own, if the goblins would let him) were ok; maybe even see about checking James and Lily's wills. Make sure that Harry was protected in all ways possible: try to buy him one of those rings to prevent mind instructions- Peter did not exactly want to come out of hiding, even if Black had been blamed for his crimes, and plus, Harry deserved to be able to keep his secrets safe, and possibly hire or buy a house elf to protect him when Peter couldn't (Lily had made James free all the original Potter elves). Get him an emergency portkey (which, as long as the destination was a private property) was quite legal, and make sure he had a spare wand (which was actually not so legal, but there was a loophole for orphans or high-profile children, of which Harry was both) make sure he had some sort of amulet to detect poisons, and so on. And then...a sudden thought struck him, and Peter gasped.
There was one other thing he could do so that Harry had an unexpected advantage over possible kidnappers or rogue Death Eaters. An animagus form. It was very difficult, but the younger a wizard was, the easier it was, and it helped that Harry would have a teacher who had gone through the ordeal without official counseling. Besides, it was speculated (although no one had ever confirmed this) that wizards who were too young to use a wand yet would find the process much easier than most, because their magic was not yet flowing in the specific channels necessary if you were going to use a wand. Peter didn't even have to register him, due to the Anonymity Act, (something which Peter would have loved to know when he was young) which stated that a wizard under seventeen years who became an animagus did not have to reveal their form (although they were pressured to do so at their legal majority), because of the instances of accidental or natural animagitism, which meant that a wizard could become an animagus without warning and without ritual preparation in the right circumstances. The legal system had decided that since an animagus form (supposedly) couldn't be attained the ordinary manner without many years of practice, it was not right to punish a young wizard for accidental magic.
"Harry?" Peter asked after a long moment of contemplation.
"Huh?" the boy asked intelligently, still concentrating on stroking that blasted snake.
"How would you feel about learning how to be an animagus?"